I am responsible for the resource management in the financial computing center (FRZ). Among other things, my tasks include the organization and care of all employee data in Blue Ant, taking care of the so-called Skill Catalog, editing resource requests, consulting on projects in staff recruiting and coordinating personnel placement.

Resource management is a central support process that sustains and relieves project management, ICT advanced training management, executives and last, but not least, the employees.

I am responsible for the project management process at the FRZ. My responsibilities include the coordination of internal projects within the portfolio management. I take care of the requirements for project work. My tasks are to look after the project management handbook, support the project head, portfolio management, compiling overviews, product management for Blue Ant MPM solution, and setting up projects.

Project management controls the Lower Saxony tax administration for the FRZ, including definition, planning, implementation, and closure of new information and communication projects (ICT projects), as well as surveillance and controlling at the portfolio level (controlling). It accounts for the project course of ICT technical principles, compliance with the minimum requirements of the courts of audit for the implementation of ICT projects and is based on the procedure model of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. With regard to the planning and implementation of ICT projects, the project management binds the courses of action.

After project goals have been defined and these goals have been arrived at independent of each other, it is necessary to visualize the results. Another condition was to create a knowledge databank (Skill Catalog), to optimize the efficiency of our operations. A positive side effect is that certain key players are not always assigned to all projects, since, notably, a request for resources in the FRZ was excluded.

The external resource assignment is also controlled by the resource management (resource manager and approval process). Therefore we’re assured that external capacities are planned and controlled in unity with internal resources.

The introduction of the resource management is supposed to give us a transparent overview of the regional finance office’s (FRZ) existent knowledge. Among others, we provide the project head and project employees with the greatest possible competency in relation to different skills. This has a strategically large bearing for our personnel development.

By introducing a pure knowledge request for project employees, the FRZ’s current employees can be won on as project employees, whereas the requested knowledge wasn’t known before. This is a great relief to our central knowledge carriers.

Because FRZ develops different system platforms, we could only go with a web-based tool. Due to the tool’s customization possibility, we were able to lower the cost for its configuration. We decided through a bidding process to go with the most economic solution.
The firm proventis GmbH pre-configured the tool. That involved accommodating approx. 200 users, specific FRZ customizing and pre-allocating the privacy rights system. In cooperation with FRZ, Blue Ant was installed and the administrators and first-time users were trained. At this time, about 80 employees work actively in Blue Ant. About 30 project heads use the project planning and controlling functions in Blue Ant for their projects.

Requests from different departments were directed to the central project manager. These were, for example, the illustration of a network plan, illustrating planned values in the knowledge databank search result lists, comparing multiple basis plans, as well as the use of ftp links for document management. These requests were internally tuned and finally requested to proventis GmbH as necessary customizations or changes to the offer. Some of these changes have already been implemented. Because the collaboration has gone so smoothly, there are only a few optimizations needed. We’ve experienced a continually improving relationship with proventis GmbH.

Ralf Engel, Regional Finance Office Hannover, zpm.sth3@ofd-sth.niedersachsen.de
Norman Frischmuth, proventis GmbH, n.frischmuth@proventis.net

Since the FRZ’s reorganization in 2004 on the basis of the IT standard ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), work has been successful. Customer orientation is constantly being improved as a result of the continuing centralization and unification of hard- and software, as well as the grouping of IT competency. The FRZ’s services are dynamically customized to users’ growing quality requests.

Working as a “steering committee state,” Lower Saxony, along with Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, and North Rhine-Westphalia, is active in the development of a unifying finance management software. The project is known as KONSENS (Koordinierte neue Softwareentwicklung der Steuerverwaltung) and is in cooperation with the federal government. As a product, Project KONSENS functions as a program for deferrals or waivers, as well as a program for supporting fine and criminal case appointments and tax fraud investigations. Lower Saxony is additionally involved in the development and care of KONSENS products, among others in the area of consultation / Project BIENE.